I ditched corporate America in 1994 and started a management consulting and venture capital firm (http://petercohan.com). I started following stocks in 1981 when I was in grad school at MIT and started analyzing tech stocks as a guest on CNBC in 1998. I became a Forbes contributor in April 2011. My 11th book is "Hungry Start-up Strategy: Creating New Ventures with Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision" (http://goo.gl/ygaUV). I also teach business strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.

FRAMINGHAM, MA - OCTOBER 05: The New England Compounding Center is shown here on October 5, 2012 in Framingham, Massachusetts. The pharmacy is currently being investigated for producing a contaminated steroid shot that included the meningitis fungus that has killed at least five people. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

By supplying a presidential candidate, a model for our national health care, and a high profile Senate race, Massachusetts is playing a big role in U.S. politics these days.

That is not all that Massachusetts is contributing though. Tragically, a Framingham, Mass.-based compounding pharmacy has distributed Meningitis-contaminated steroid syringes that have killed 14 and sickened 184 Americans.

And now the State’s politics and the purveyor of those killer syringes are intersecting. That’s because on September 4, the Senate candidate, Scott Brown, received a $10,000 campaign contribution at the Southborough, Mass. home of Gregory Conigliaro, a co-owner of New England Compounding Center (NECC) — a so-called compounding pharmacy that was sending “controlled substances to clinics, veterinarians, and other health facilities,” according to the Boston Globe. “Conigliaro also raised $37,000 from 85-90 people at a fundraiser at his house for Brown,” according to WCVB reporter Sarah Stolper.

That $10,000 came six weeks after Brown co-signed a July 24 letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that argued in favor of “a top legislative priority of the compounding pharmacy industry,” according to the Globe.

Brown’s campaign claimed it would donate that $10,000 to the Meningitis Foundation of America a week after the Meningitis-infected needles were traced to NECC. However, WCVB reporter, Janet Wu, emailed October 15 to say the ”Senator is NOT returning that $$$.”

Brown told the Globe that there is no connection between his signing the letter and the $10,000. But NECC — and compounding pharmacies in general — are an outstanding example of why it is so important for government to regulate business.

After all, since 2002, NECC has been subject to repeated regulatory run-ins. For example, in 2004, Reuters reported, the FDA and the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy inspected NECC and in 2006 the FDA issued a warning letter.

According to the letter, NECC was “splitting the cancer drug Avastin into multiple doses to be used to treat an eye condition” which could result in a disease leading to ”significant vision loss.” And the letter noted that NECC’s lack of “control over storage, and delays before use after repackaging, only exacerbate these concerns.”

And clearly NECC needed — but did not get — the kind of regulatory scrutinty that is anathema to Republicans like Brown. The need for tighter scrutiny is evident in claims reported by the New York Times about quality control issues at Westborough, Mass.-based Ameridose, another compounding pharmacy co-owned by many of NECC’s co-owners.

Ameridose’s quality control problems include concerns about unqualified people preparing narcotics, management over-ruling an employee concerned about missing labels, and a salesman and his colleagues who management ordered to help out with packaging and labeling during rush orders — something they were not trained to do, according to the Times.

One quality control technician told the Times that Ameridose pushed for speed over quality. That technician said, “The emphasis was always on speed, not on doing the job right. One of their favorite phrases was ‘This line is worth more than all your lives combined, so don’t stop it.’ ”

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